Video Lecture: The Textus Receptus

Lecture 10:  The Textus Receptus

Lecture #10 in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism is now available to watch at YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tb1N4_k1w .

In this 21-minute video, I describe the development of the Textus Receptus, the text that dominated the 1500s, and from which the New Testament was translated in the King James Version.

An extract:

            Today, we are looking into the background of what is known as the Textus Receptus.  In Latin, “Textus receptus” simply means “the received text.”  There are two ways to define the Textus Receptus.

            The simpler way is to say that the Textus Receptus is the base-text of the New Testament in the King James Version, also known as the Authorized Version, which was published in 1611 and subsequently tidied up in 1629 to address printing errors and similar glitches. 

            In 1633, the Elzevir family printers issued an edition of the Greek New Testament that was accompanied by a reassuring statement that its reader had “the text now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.”   This was the first Greek New Testament that one could say called itself the Received Text.

            But for the most part, the Greek text of 1633 published by the Elzevirs was not drastically different from several earlier editions which had been used by earlier translators, in the 1500s.  A variety of editions of the Greek New Testament were in circulation before 1633, but three editors stand out above the rest:  Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza.

             Desiderius Erasmus, born in 1467, grew up in an environment of scholarly challenges to sacred traditions.  The Latin Vulgate had acquired a de facto status as the authoritative text of the New Testament in western Europe, but in the 1400s, a scholar named Lorenzo Valla, who died ten years before Erasmus was born, had used Greek manuscripts to draw into question a variety of renderings in the text of the Vulgate that was current in his time.  Valla made notes upon the Greek New Testament, and pointed out various discrepancies between the meaning of the Greek text and the meaning of the Vulgate text. 

            Some of Valla’s observations eventually had great significance.  In Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” nailed to the church door at Wittenburg, Germany in 1517, his first three points focused on the meaning of repentance.  In this respect, Luther was echoing a clarification that Valla had already made in the 1450s about the meaning of the Greek text.

             Valla never published his notes about Vulgate readings that needed to be improved to correspond better with the Greek text.  But in 1504, when Erasmus found a manuscript that contained Valla’s Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum – Notes on the New Testament – it inspired him to make the study of the Greek text of the New Testament his life’s work.     Erasmus traveled extensively, studying in Italy, in France, and in England, investigating New Testament manuscripts wherever they could be found, including the unusual minuscule 69.  Erasmus was also very well-acquainted with the works of Jerome, and the patristic writer known as Ambrosiaster.  

            In 1514 and again in 1515, the subject of improving the Vulgate, using the Greek text, came up in conversations he had with his friend Johann Froben, who ran a distinguished printing-house in the city of Basel, Switzerland. 

            In July of 1515, Erasmus began the final stage of making a Greek text of the New Testament, using a small collection of Greek manuscripts at Basel.   The uncial Codex Basiliensis, Codex E, a.k.a. 07, produced in the 700s, was at Basel at this time, but there is no evidence that Erasmus ever used it.  Instead, the manuscripts housed at Basel that Erasmus used were a collection of minuscules:

Codex 1.  This manuscript contains the New Testament except Revelation;    it is an important member of family-1.

Codex 2 contains the Gospels.

Codex 2105 contains the Pauline Epistles. 

Codex 2815 contains Acts and all Epistles (2^ap).  (not from John of Ragusa)

Codex 2816 – containing Acts and all Epistles (4^ap)

Codex 2817 – contains the Pauline Epistles (7^p)

There was no Greek manuscript of Revelation in the library at Basel, so he borrowed a manuscript of Revelation, minuscule 2814, from his colleague Johann Reuchlin, the great-uncle of the influential Reformer Phillip Melanchthon. 

             These were not the only sources used by Erasmus for his first edition, but they were the manuscripts he had on hand at Basel.

            What were Greek New Testament manuscripts doing at Basel?  Most of them had been donated to the Dominican monastery there by Ivan Stojkovic, also known as John of Ragusa, in the 1400s.  Before his death in 1443, he had joined a vigorous effort, led by Basil Bessarion, to re-unite the church.  As a means of showing what the Eastern churches had to offer to churches in the West, he brought some manuscripts to Europe from Constantinople, in the 1430s.    

            Equipped with a familiarity of various manuscripts in various scholarly centers in Britain and continental Europe, and equipped with the manuscripts at Basel, Erasmus hammered out the first edition of the Greek New Testament, confirming his Latin translation alongside it, with explanatory notes after it.  On March 1, 1516, Novum Instrumentum became the first Greek New Testament available for purchase from Froben.

            Another Greek New Testament had already been printed:  the Greek New Testament was part of the Complutensian Polyglot, a text of the entire Bible, printed in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, prepared under the supervision of Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, with help from Lopez de Stunica.  “Complutensian” means that it was made in Complutum, another name for the city of Alcala, near Madrid, Spain.  “Polyglot” means that its text appeared in several languages.  The New Testament portion of the Complutensian Polyglot was printed in 1514, but it was not formally approved for ecclesiastical publication until 1522.

             The first edition of Novum Instrumentum encountered some resistance.  Some readers saw Erasmus’ Latin translation not as a corrective supplement to the Vulgate, but as a rival.  Others asked, why settle for the echo in Latin when you can hear the voice in Greek?  Why drink from a dirty stream when you can drink from the fountain?  Erasmus made a second edition, Novum Testamentum, in 1519, correcting many of the printing errors that had marred the first edition, and improving his Latin translation. 

            Some critics accused Erasmus of displaying negligence by failing to include a reference to the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit in First John 5:7, a reading in the Vulgate text that was very common in the early 1500s.  Erasmus replied that he had no basis for such a Greek text, because he had found no Greek manuscript that had those words at that place:  if he had possessed a Greek manuscript with that passage, he wrote, then he would have included them, but since he had no such thing, no one could fairly charge him with negligence for paying attention to his manuscripts.

                In 1522, Erasmus released a third edition, refining the Greek compilation, his Latin translation, and the annotations.  He acquired a little more manuscript-evidence at the library of St. Donatian’s College at Bruges, and he was given access to the Golden Gospels of Henry III, an ornate Vulgate Gospels codex produced around the year 1000. 

            By this time, he had been informed of the existence of a manuscript in Britain – now known as minuscule 61, Codex Montfortianus – that contained the passage known as the Comma Johanneum in First John 5:7, and so he included the phrase in the third edition.  In 1521, Erasmus was also informed by Paul Bombasius, who oversaw the Vatican Library at that time, about the existence of Codex Vaticanus, and about Vaticanus’ testimony against the Comma Johanneum.  Erasmus had not explicitly promised to include the passage, but he did so anyway.  To not include it, now that it had been shown that at least one Greek manuscript supported it, would have put him in a position that would have been difficult to defend. 

            A fourth edition was issued in 1527.  By this time, Erasmus had become acquainted with the Complutensian Polyglot, and he made some changes to the Greek text as a result, especially in Revelation. 

             Also, Erasmus was informed a little more about the text of Codex Vaticanus, thanks to some correspondence with Juan Sepulveda, who was at Rome at that time.  But despite Sepulveda’s praise of the manuscript, Erasmus casually dismissed its testimony, supposing that it was one of a group of Greek manuscripts that were adjusted to agree with a Latin text.

            Finally, a fifth edition was issued in 1535, one year before the death of Erasmus. 

            All this time, Erasmus took all comers in defense of his compilation, vigorously responding to criticisms from friend and foe, including Stunica, who had worked on the Complutensian Polyglot.  Erasmus found it convenient to repeat the gist of the answer that Lorenzo Valla had prepared against those whom he had anticipated would accuse him of tampering with established tradition:  Valla had written, “If I am correcting anything, I am not correcting Sacred Scripture, but rather its translation.  In doing so I am not being insolent toward Scripture, but rather pious, and I am doing nothing more than translating better than the earlier translator.  Therefore, if my translation is correct, that is what ought to be called Sacred Scripture, not his.”

            Erasmus also explained his predicament by telling a story about a priest who somehow had gotten used to saying “mumpsimus,” which is not a real word, in the Latin Mass.  When another clergyman informed him that the correct word is “sumpsimus,” he replied, “You can keep your new-fangled sumpsimus; I want good old mumpsimus.”  This was Erasmus’ way of explaining that the fundamental question is not, “What are you used to?”, but, “What is original?”.

            Erasmus and Froben had been very much aware that thanks to the potential of the new technology of the printing press, their publication of the printed Greek New Testament had the potential to culminate in the ordinary person having the New Testament in his own language. In Paracelsis, the preface to his New Testament, Erasmus wrote that it was his desire that men and woman would know the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul in their own languages – that they would be known not only to the clergy but to farmers and fabric-makers, and that they would be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens.

            Earlier in the 1400s, before Erasmus was even born, another scholar, named Giannozzo Manetti, had compiled a Greek base-text and translated it into Latin – but no one had used it.  The text of Erasmus’ second edition, however, was obtained by Martin Luther, and when an opportunity came, Luther definitely used it:  before the end of September 1522, Luther had translated the Greek New Testament into German.    

            William Tyndale, an English scholar, gained access to a copy of Luther’s German New Testament, and then he acquired a copy of the third edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament.  Tyndale finished translating this into English before the end of 1525.  It was reprinted in 1526. 

            Newly produced unauthorized English Bibles were highly illegal in England at the time, and most copies of Tyndale’s English New Testament were burned whenever they were found.  William Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and was eventually captured.  In 1536, he was executed.  His last recorded words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

            By 1539, the Great Bible, which tended to echo Tyndale’s English New Testament, was being openly distributed in England.

             Jacques Lefèvre, known as Stapulensis, oversaw the translation of the Vulgate New Testament into French, in stages, consulting Erasmus’ work as a secondary source.  His printed French New Testament was published in 1523.  He was extremely influential in the Protestant Reformation in other respects, although, like Erasmus, he never officially left the Roman Catholic Church.  Stapulensis’ translation of the New Testament was adjusted in a more Greek-dependent direction by Robert Olivetan, a cousin of John Calvin, and it was later revised again by Theodore Beza.

            With French, German, and English New Testaments already in print, the next generation of textual critics was led by Robert Estienne, also known as Stephanus.  Stephanus’ skill in printing and typography was at least as good as his expertise in textual criticism, and after publishing Greek New Testaments in 1546 and 1549, he outdid himself in the edition of 1550, his third edition, also called the Editio Regia, or “Royal Edition.” 

            In this publication, Stephanus included a textual apparatus, providing alternate readings from the Complutensian Polyglot and from an assortment of 15 Greek manuscripts, including several manuscripts in the royal library, which included the Gospels-Codex L, 019, and minuscule 6.  Codex Bezae, now usually assigned to the 400s, was also cited.

            Codex Bezae was called Codex Bezae because it was the property of Theodore Beza.  Born in 1519, Beza became an influential ally of John Calvin during the Reformation.  From the 1550s up to 1598, Beza issued multiple editions of the Greek New Testament.  He utilized not only Codex Bezae, but also the uncial Codex Claromontanus.  Nevertheless, his compilation did not drastically veer away from the standard set by Erasmus and Stephanus.  Beza’s 1598 edition is probably the closest thing there is to a pre-KJV base-text of the KJV New Testament.

            While Protestants were producing translations in several European languages, based on several editions of the Greek New Testament, Roman Catholic scholars tended to emphasize the Latin Vulgate.  In the mid-1500s, Nicholas Zegers attempted to filter mistakes out of the Vulgate text, on the basis of Greek readings.  But when the Rheims New Testament was published, in 1582, based on the Vulgate, it was prefaced by an explanation of why the Vulgate was being translated instead of the Greek text. 

            The Preface to the Rheims New Testament called the Protestants’ Greek text hopelessly corrupt.  Some of its readings had been invented by the editors, and the compilations did not always agree with each other; examples of inconsistency were cited from Mark 7:3, Luke 3:36, Second Timothy 2:14, James 5:12, Revelation 11:2, and Romans 12:11,  where Stephanus’ text meant, “serving the time,” and Erasmus’ text meant, “serving the Lord.”   

            Erasmus was indeed guilty of putting some conjectures into his text.  In Acts 9:5-6, he made a harmonization in the Greek text, so as to make it resemble the parallel-passage in Acts 26.  And in James 4:2, instead of saying “you kill,” the second edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament read, “you are jealous.”  Erasmus believed that the Greek manuscripts he used contained a corruption at this point, and that their copyists had written a Greek word that means “you kill,” where James had written a similar Greek word that means “you are jealous.”

            Perhaps the most famous example of hypothetical reconstruction of the text without Greek manuscript support involved the last six verses of the book of Revelation.  The manuscript that Erasmus had borrowed from Johann Reuchlin, 2814, was damaged, and did not have this part of the the book, or the commentary that accompanied it.  Erasmus, in order to finish the first edition of his compilation, used Valla’s notes and a Latin Vulgate text to reconstruct the Greek text of verses 16-21.  He acknowledged in his annotations that he had done this.

            Erasmus reckoned that any shortcomings in his retro-translation could be corrected by using the Aldine Bible, an edition of the Greek Bible that was released in 1518 in Venice, Italy.  What Erasmus did not realize was that the New Testament in the Aldine Bible was dependent to a large extent upon his own compilation.

            Greek copies of Revelation were so rare, and Erasmus’ compilation was so widely accepted, that his retro-translation of Revelation 22:16-21 continued to be reprinted in one edition after another, including the reference to the “book” of life, instead of the tree of life, in the second half of verse 19.

            It was these editions, and the earlier English translations based upon them, that were consulted by the translators of the King James Version in 1604 to 1611.   There were some readings that were very poorly attested, such as the reading koinōnia in Ephesians 3:9, and there were some readings that had no Greek manuscript support at all, especially in Revelation.

            But for the most part, the Textus Receptus – whether one defines it as the base-text of the KJV, or as the multiple printed editions of the Greek New Testament prepared from 1516 to 1633 – is a good representative of the Byzantine Text of Matthew-Jude – and most of its readings can be found in manuscript evidence much older than the minuscule manuscripts upon which it was based.   In the Gospels, there is very little difference between the meaning of the text printed in the Textus Receptus, based on no more than 25 copies, and the meaning of the Byzantine Text found in 1,500 copies.  

             So, even though the Textus Receptus was initially compiled on the basis of relatively few manuscripts, and even though it has some readings that are only supported by a small minority of Greek manuscripts, and a few readings that are not supported by any Greek manuscripts at all, if you compare the Textus Receptus and the Nestle-Aland compilation at any given point in Matthew-Jude, it is the reading in the Textus Receptus, not the reading in Nestle-Aland, that will usually be supported by at least 85% of the relevant Greek manuscripts known today.

             Fast-forward to April of 1853. At Cambridge University, a young professor wrote about a text-critical project he intended to undertaken with another professor:  “Our object is to supply clergymen generally, schools, etc., with a portable Greek Testament, which shall not be disfigured with Byzantine corruptions.”  His name was Fenton John Anthony Hort.  God willing, his approach to the New Testament text, and his involvement in the Revised Version, will be the subject of our next lecture.

             In closing, to read more about the Greek text compiled in the 1500s, read pages 1-36 of Samuel Tregelles’ 1844 book An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament.

             Thank you.

 

 

The Textus Receptuses

Erasmus of Rotterdam,
a compiler of the
Greek New Testament

The Latin term “Textus Receptus” (“the text that is received”) is often used to refer to the Greek base-text of the King James Version – the English version which, despite the best efforts of the marketers of modern versions, remains by far the most-read English version of the Bible.  The Textus Receptus was published by the Elzevirs in 1624 and in 1633; it was in the preface to the 1633 edition that the term Textus Receptus was introduced.  Much later, in the late 1800s, F. H. A. Scrivener attempted to meticulously retro-translate the KJV’s New Testament’s English text into readings (and, very rarely, conjectures) known to be in circulation at the time of, and available to, the KJV’s translators.

            The term “Textus Receptus” is also used to refer in a general sense to the printed Greek New Testaments which were compiled and published in the 1500’s by the scholars Desiderius Erasmus, Robert Estienne (better-known as Stephanus, who standardized the verse-numbers), and Theodore Beza.

For general purposes, there’s nothing wrong with calling all those printed compilations by the same name, since their basic contents are so similar.  The modern critical text is likewise often referred to simply as “the critical text,” even though there are differences among the various editions.  (Likewise, the edition of the New International Version as it is published today still retains the name of the 1984 edition, even though there are many differences between them.)

            It may be helpful, however, to raise the magnification-level, so to speak, with which the compilations of the 1500s and early 1600s are viewed.  This may reduce the chance that people will get the impression – all too easily obtained from some oversimplifications of the history of the text – that the exact same compilation made by Erasmus that left Froben’s printing-shop in 1516 was the sole Greek resource consulted by the King James Version’s translators in 1604-1611. 

            So, here is a list of some differences between the KJV’s base-text and some of the base-texts of earlier English translations in the 1500’s, drawn from the four Gospels:   

Matthew

2:11 – KJV:  “saw” (ειδον), not “found” (ευρον)

10:10 – KJV:  “staves” (ραβδους) not “staff” (ραβδον)

21:7 – KJV says “they set him” (επεκάθισαν) instead of “he sat” (επεκάθισεν)

23:13-14 – KJV reverses the order of these verses.

Mark

5:38 – KJV includes “and” (και) before “them that wept” (κλαίοντας)

9:40 – KJV says “us” and “our” (ημων) instead of “you” and “your” (υμων)

12:20 – KJV includes “Now” (ουν) in the opening sentence.

15:3 – KJV includes “But he answered nothing.” (αυτος δε ουδε απεκρίνατο)

Luke

1:35 – KJV includes “of thee” (εκ σου).  This difference is still echoed in the NKJV, which does not include the phrase.

2:22 – KJV says “her” (αυτης) instead of “their” (αυτων).

6:37 – KJV does not include “and” (και) at the beginning of the verse.

7:45 – KJV says “I came in” (εισηλθον) instead of “she came in” (εισηλθεν)

10:22 – KJV does not include Και στραφεις προς τους μαθητας ειπεν (“And turning to the disciples he said”)

17:36 – KJV includes this verse.

20:31 – KJV includes “also” (και)

John

8:6 – KJV has “as though he heard them not” (μη προσποιούμενος) at the end of the verse.  (This phrase was not italicized in the 1611 KJV; Scrivener suggested that the italization occurred in the 1769 update of the KJV.) 

8:42 – KJV does not include “therefore” (ουν). 

18:24 – KJV has “Now” (ουν).   

            An especially notable difference between the KJV’s Greek base-text and some of the compilations of the 1500’s occurs in the final phrase of Romans 12:11.  Nowadays, it is taken for granted that the original text read “serving the Lord” (τω Κυριω δουλεύοντες), but in several editions of the Greek text prepared in the 1500’s, the phrase reads “serving the time” (τω καιρω δουλεύοντες).  (Both readings are ancient, having been both mentioned by patristic authors such as Jerome (in Epistle 27, written in 384.) 

            This sample-list should be a sufficient demonstration to those who subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith that its declaration to the effect that the Greek text of their day was “pure” did not mean that the authors of that creed regarded every text-critical detail to be settled, as if one could answer all text-critical issues merely by pointing to a particular compilation.  In general terms the KJV’s New Testament is based on the Textus Receptus but regarding some details there is not one definitive Textus Receptus, unless one uses the term to refer to compilations (the Elzevir’s compilation of 1633 being the most famous) designed to reconstruct the base-text of the King James Version. 

If these differences between the King James Version and some of the Greek compilations of the 1500’s are kept in mind, this will hopefully reduce the spread of oversimplifications of the history of the text.  For it is sometimes said by the KJV’s promoters that its text agrees with the majority of manuscripts, which is generally true, but not in every case.  Likewise it is sometimes said by the KJV’s detractors that its text is based on merely a handful of manuscripts used by Erasmus, which unfairly minimizes not only Erasmus’ extensive research undertaken before he sat down in Basel to prepare his first edition of the Greek New Testament, but also overlooks the 88 years of additional textual analysis and refinement that commenced between 1516 and 1604, some of which involved ancient manuscripts (Codex Bezae and Codex Claromontanus) and extensive quotations by early patristic sources. 

[Readers are invited to explore the embedded links to find additional resources.]

Codex Regius (019) - The Manuscript-King of France

The first page of Mark
in Codex L.

          Many of the manuscripts currently in the National Library of France – the Bibliothèque nationale de France – were once part of the royal library.  It is for this reason that Codex L (019), a Gospels-manuscript from the 700’s, is known as Codex Regius – the royal book.  A strong case can be made that Codex L is the most important New Testament manuscript in France.  Its text and its history are both highly interesting.

          Although it is sometimes claimed that the scholars of the 1500’s only had access to relatively young and unimportant manuscripts, that is not the case.  Codex L is a very important manuscript of venerable age, and its readings were cited by Stephanus in the notes of his 1551 Greek New Testament; it was identified as witness ηʹ, that is, #8.  This manuscript has long been recognized by the compilers of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece as a member of the elite group of “Consistently cited witnesses of the first order” for all four Gospels – one of only eight uncial manuscripts that share this status.  Its uncial text is written in two columns per page, with many initials decorated in red, green, and blue.    

          In the Gospel of Matthew, L’s text initially looks like nothing very unusual; for the first 17 chapters, it is essentially Byzantine.  Around Matthew 17:26, however, its character abruptly becomes Alexandrian, as if, somewhere in its ancestry, a copyist began to conform an Alexandrian manuscript to the text of a Byzantine exemplar, but gave up at this point.  This makes its agreements with the Byzantine Text in the remaining portion of the text (agreements such as the inclusion of Luke 22:43-44 and John 5:4) all the more weighty.  (For more information see Robert Waltz’s description of the codex at the newly updated Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism.)  

The Alexandrian
addition in Matthew 27:49.

          Codex L features a distinctly Alexandrian reading at Matthew 27:49 that states that Jesus was pierced with a spear before He died.  This reading, also supported by Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, has been consistently ignored by the annotators of most modern English translations, even though it has far more Greek support than the famous abrupt ending of Mark.  In the ESV and CSB, there is no mention of this variant.  It is no wonder that so many evangelicals consider it is a good idea to prefer the Alexandrian Text over the Byzantine Text, and regard Vaticanus and Sinaiticus as superior manuscripts, when they are kept in the dark about errant passages such as this one embedded in the Alexandrian Text.             Codex L also agrees with À and B by lacking the story about the adulteress after John 7:52.  However, there is more to the picture:  after John 7:52, the copyists of Codex L left “memorial space” in the manuscript, signifying that although their master-copy did not contain the absent passage, the copyists recollected its presence in another manuscript, or in other manuscripts.  (Someone later drew a doodle in part of the blank space.)
          Codex L represents two opposite testimonies regarding John 7:53-8:11 – on one hand, its main exemplar apparently did not have these verses; on the other hand, the copyists clearly knew the passage and wanted future readers to know that they knew.  (Alas; we cannot know whether or not Codex L contained the pericope adulterae at the end of the Gospel of John.  Codex L’s last extant page ends in John 21:15.)

The blank space in Codex L
between John 7:52 and 8:12.

          Codex L’s most famous feature involves the ending of the Gospel of Mark.  Codex L’s scribes inserted a row of “>” marks below the first column of a page, where Mark 16:8 ends (with the letters το γαρ on the final line, which happens to be a feature shared by À and B).  At the top of the next column, a framed note says, Φερετε που και ταυτα, that is, accounting for an itacism in the first word, “Some have this too.”  This is followed by the paragraph known as the Shorter Ending.  Here is the exact text of the Shorter Ending as it appears in Codex L, line by line:

Πάντα δὲ τα παρη / γγελμενα τοῖς / περι τον πετρον / συντομως ἐξη /
γγιλαν – Μετα / δὲ ταῦτα καὶ αὐτος / ο ΙΣ, ἀπο ἀνατολης / και ἀχρι δυσεως / ἐξαπεστιλεν δι / ἀυτων το ϊερον / καὶ ἀφθαρτον κη / ρυγμα – της αἰω / 

νιου σωτηριας – .

After Mark 16:8, the Shorter
Ending appears,
preceded and followed
by notes, followed by 16:9.

          Unlike the text of the Shorter Ending found in Codex Ψ (which includes the word εφανε – appeared –  after Jesus’ name), the fragment 099, some Sahidic manuscripts, Bohairic MS Huntington 18, and the Ethiopic version (which support εφανε αυτοις – appeared to them), Codex L does not specify that Jesus appeared to the apostles.  In this respect, although Codex L, as a manuscript, is centuries younger than the fifth-century Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis (which has the reading adparuit, i.e., apparuit – appeared), the text of the Shorter Ending in Codex L appears to echo an earlier stage of the Shorter Ending’s existence.

          After the Shorter Ending, a framed note in Codex L says, εστην δε και ταυτα φερομενα μετα το εφοβουντο γαρ – that is, “There is also this, appearing after efobounto gar.”  After this, the first part of verse 9 begins, filling the last two lines of the column; the first line is written in red, with a large initial “A” colored with red and green.  The next two pages contain Mark 16:9b-20, with distinctive variants which confirm what the notes already show:  not only does Codex L display a distinctly Egyptian treatment of the ending of Mark, but the text of verses 9-20 here is in a distinctly Egyptian form, with readings that set it apart from the other text-types. 

         Here are some non-Byzantine readings in Mark 16:9-20 in Codex L:

9 – L reads παρ’; Byz reads ἀφ’.

11 – L reads Εκεινοι; Byz reads Κἀκεινοι.

14 – L omits αυτοις (probably a simple parableptic error); Byz reads αυτοις.

16 – L adds ο before βαπτισθεις; Byz does not.

17 – L reads ακολουθησει ταυτα; Byz reads ταυτα παρακολουθήσει.

17 – L omits καιναις; Byz reads καιναις.

18 – L reads και εν ταις χερσιν; Byz does not.

18 – L reads ἀρωστους; Byz reads ἀρρώστους.

19 – L omits ουν; Byz reads ουν.

19 – L reads ΚΣ ΙΣ (i.e., Lord Jesus); Byz reads Κύριος (i.e., Lord).

Mark 16:9b-17a

          Inasmuch as these readings were not derived from the Byzantine text of verses 9-20, the implication is that they attest to a local form of the text in Egypt.  And inasmuch as the text of the Shorter Ending in Codex L precedes the form attested by Codex Bobiensis (from the early 400’s), we are probably looking at an Egyptian text from the late 300’s on any given page of Mark, Luke, and John in Codex L.  Although, as a manuscript, Codex L is a few centuries later than Codex Sinaiticus, in terms of their texts, Codex L’s text, in general, is only a few decades later than Codex Sinaiticus, where Codex L is free of scribal errors that originated with its copyist.  Codex Regius is truly worthy of royal status among Greek manuscripts of the Gospels.

          Here are some additional details about this manuscript which may come in handy for those who wish to study it further.  (Digital page-views can be accessed at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, and the images of Codex L there have all been conveniently indexed.  A PDF of the manuscript can also be downloaded from the BnF website.)  It is missing a few pages, which contained Matthew 4:22-5:14, Matthew 28:17-20, Mark 10:16-20, Mark 15:2-20, and John 21:15b-25.  Also, some of its pages are bound out of order, so when you look through the digital images, the pages containing John 5:29b-7:34a appear in Matthew, after Matthew 14:8a (and before Matthew 18:10b), and the pages containing Matthew 14:8b-18:10a appear in John, after John 5:29a (and before John 7:34b). 

Mark 16:17b-20,
the subscription,
and the beginning of
the chapter-list
for Luke.

          Codex L has some interesting meta-textual (or para-textual) features, too.  Chapter-lists precede Matthew, Mark (incomplete, due to the loss of a leaf), and Luke, but not John.  The numerals for the Eusebian Sections and Canons appear in the margins, but they contain lots of mistakes, as if the person who added them was not quite sure what he was doing.  The manuscript also contains αρχη (start) and τελος (stop) symbols to signify the beginnings and ends of lections.  Red crosses accompany some lections that were particularly important.  A foot-index (similar, in concept, to individual lines of a line-by-line canon-table) comes and goes.  And, in the upper margins, most of the chapter-titles have survived, written in red.  The scribe frequently added embellishments to capital letters at the beginnings of sections, especially alpha, epsilon, kappa, omicron, and tau.  In a few places, the middle bar of the large initial epsilon is transformed into a forearm; the large initial at the beginning of Luke is a good example of this.

          Finally, one more feature of Codex L may be mentioned:  its division of the text into sentences.  Although Codex L is by no means unique, the correspondence between its sentence-divisions, and our modern verse-divisions, is rather impressive.  On page after page, they square up remarkably well.  It is tempting to think that when Stephanus established our modern-day verse-divisions in the 1550's, it was after a careful consultation of the sentence-divisions in this manuscript at Paris.

Hand-to-Hand Combat: P72 versus Minuscule 6

          Papyrus 72 is one of the participants in today’s hand-to-hand contest.  It is possibly the oldest substantial manuscript of the book of Jude, being usually assigned a production-date in the late 200’s or early 300’s.  (Papyrus 78 may be slightly older but it is a fragment, containing less than half of Jude’s 25 verses.)  Papyrus 72 contains much more than the Epistle of Jude; it also contains First Peter and Second Peter and some other compositions – but today we will focus on its text of Jude, and not the entire book, but just the first 10 verses.  You can access page-views of P72 at the website of the Vatican Library. 

          In the opposite corner, we have minuscule 6, from the 1200’s.  Minuscule 6 is one of the manuscripts known to European researchers in the 1500’s; it was cited by Stephanus as witness #5, that is, εʹ, in his 1550 edition of the Greek New Testament.  Microfilm-images of the pages of minuscule 6 can be viewed at the website of the National Library of France; it is catalogued as MS Grec. 112.  The text of Jude begins on page-view 137.  Minuscule 6 is not your typical manuscript; it sometimes shares unusual readings with the important minuscules 1739 and 1881. 

          It is not uncommon to read claims to the effect that the manuscripts used by researchers in the 1500’s were “late and inferior.”  So you might expect that an Alexandrian manuscript made around 300 will prove to be far more accurate than such a medieval manuscript.  Will that be what we observe when P72 and minuscule 6 square off in the ring?            

          Let’s find out.  Today’s battleground consists of the first 10 verses of the Epistle of Jude.  The rules used for the previous contests apply here:  the Nestle-Aland compilation will be the standard of comparison.  Nomina sacra and other decipherable contractions are not considered variants as such.  Transpositions are mentioned but are not included in the totals.  Words in brackets in the NA compilation will be treated as part of the text.  In addition, I have defined P72’s text as the text that left the copyist’s hand; that is, the text of P72 that is evaluated here includes corrections made by the copyist as he wrote.         

Papyrus 72, compared to NA27:

1 – no differences

2 – P72 reads πληθυνθιη instead of πληθυνθειη (-1)

3 – P72 reads ποιησαμενος instead of ποιουμενος (+3, -2) 

3 – P72 reads του before γραφειν (+3)

3 – P72 reads γραφιν instead of γραφειν (-1)

3 – P72 reads περει instead of περι (+1)

3 – P72 reads επαγωνιζεσθε instead of επαγωνιζεσθαι (+1, -2)

3 – P72 reads πειστει instead of πιστει (+1)

4 – P72 reads παλε instead of παλαι (+1, -2)

4 – P72 reads προγεγραμενοι instead of προγεγραμμενοι (-1)

4 – P72 reads χαρειτα instead of χαριτα (+1)

4 – P72 does not read νομον; the copyist wrote this word but then crossed it out. (-5)

4 – P72 reads κν ιην χρν ημων instead of κν ημων ιην χρν (transposition)

5 – P72 reads Υπομνησε instead of Υπομνησαι (+2, -1)

5 – P72 does not have υμας after ειδοτας (-4)

5 – P72 reads απαξ παντα οτι θς χρς instead of παντα οτι ο κς απαξ (transposition) (+4, -2)

5 – P72 reads εγ instead of εκ (+1, -1)

5 – P72 reads Εγυπτου instead of Αιγυπτου (+1, -2)

5 – P72 reads πειστευσαντας instead of πιστευσαντας (+1)

6 – P72 reads απολειποντας instead of απολιποντας (+1)

6 – P72 reads αειδειοις instead of αιδιοις (+2)

7 – P72 reads Γομορα instead of Γομορρα (-1)

7 – P72 reads ε instead of αι (+1, -2)

7 – P72 reads περει instead of περι (+1)

7 – P72 reads απελθουσε instead of απελθουσαι (+1, -2)

7 – P72 reads τερας instead of ετερας (-1)

7 – P72 reads προσκειντε instead of προκεινται (+2, -2)

7 – P72 reads διγμα instead of δειγμα (-1)

7 – P72 reads εωνιου instead of αιωνιου (+1, -2)

8 – P72 does not have μεν after σαρκα (-3)

8 – P72 reads μειενουσιν instead of μιαινουσιν (+3, -3)

8 – P72 reads αθετουσι instead of αθετουσιν (-1)

8 – P72 reads βασφημουσιν instead of βλασφημουσιν (-1)

9 – P72 reads Μιχαης instead of Μιχαηλ (+1, -1)

9 – P72 reads Μουσεως instead of Μωυσεως (+1, -1)

9 – P72 reads επειτειμησαι instead of επιτιμησαι (+2)

10 – P72 reads υδασιν instead of οιδασιν (+1, -2)

10 – P72 reads επειστανται instead of επιστανται (+1)

10 – P72 reads φθιρονται instead of φθειρονται (-1)

The text of Jude verses 1-5
in minuscule 6.

Thus when we examine the contents of verses 1-10 of the Epistle of Jude in Papyrus 72, using NA27 as the standard of comparison, we find that 38 non-original letters are present, and 50 original letters are absent, for a total of 88 letters’ worth of corruption, most of which are spelling-related. 

Now let’s compare the text of minuscule 6 to NA27:

1 – 6 reads χυ ιυ (transposition)

1 – 6 reads εθνεσι instead of εν Θεω (+5, -4)  [Regarding this variant, which is not mentioned in Metzger’s Textual Commentary, or in the NET, or in the NKJV’s footnotes, see Robert Waltz’s comments.]

1 – 6 reads ηγιασμενοις instead of ηγαπημενοις (+3, -3)

2 – no differences

3 – 6 reads υμων instead of ημων (+1, -1)

3 – 6 reads εχων instead of εσχον (+1, -2)

4 – 6 reads χαριν instead of χαριτα (+1, -2)

5 – 6 reads ουν instead of δε (+3, -2)

5 – 6 does not have υμας after ειδοτας (-4)

5 – 6 reads Ις instead of ο Κς (+1, -2)

6 – no differences.

7 – 6 reads τουτοις τροπον instead of τροπον τουτοις (transposition)

8 – 6 reads μιαινουσι instead of μιαινουσιν (-1)

8 – 6 reads αθετουσι instead of αθετουσιν (-1)

9 – 6 reads Μωσεως instead of Μωυσεως (-1)

9 – 6 reads ετολμησε instead of ετολμησεν (-1)

9 – 6 reads αλλ instead of αλλα (-1)

10 – 6 reads οιδασι instead of οιδασιν (-1)

Thus in minuscule 6 in the first 10 verses of Jude, 15 non-original letters are present, and 26 original letters are absent, yielding a total of 41 letters’ worth of corruption. 

The score of minuscule 6 improves when the text of NA28 is the standard of comparison.  One of the newly adopted readings in NA28 is in verse 5; instead of “πάντα ὅτι [ο] κύριος απαξ,” the text of NA28 reads  απαξ παντα οτι Ιησους.  This implies a transposition in the text of minuscule 6, but it also brings minuscule 6’s total amount of corruption down to 14 non-original letters present and 24 original letters absent, yielding a total of 38 letters’ worth of corruption.  When P72’s score is compared to NA28, its score also improves, by a single letter, to 87.    

Thus, in Jude verses 1-10, when NA28 is used as the standard of comparison, minuscule 6 has only 44% as much corruption as P72 does.  Papyrus 72, our earliest complete manuscript of Jude, had a transmission-stream only 230 years long (positing its production in 300 and the composition of the Epistle of Jude around the year 70).  Minuscule 6, one of those “late and inferior” manuscripts known to Reformation-era scholars in the mid-1500’s, had a transmission-stream that was about 1,050 years long.  In the first 10 verses of Jude, the copyists in P72’s transmission-line in Egypt introduced twice as much corruption in one-fourth as much time.

(Readers are invited to check the data and math in this post.)

Hand to Hand Combat: Codex Sinaiticus vs. Minuscule 4

          Codex Sinaiticus returns to the combat-ring today!  Facing this heavyweight is a relatively obscure challenger:  minuscule 4.  This Gospels-manuscript from the 1200’s is so little-known that it seems appropriate to offer some information about its background (or possible background) before the contest begins.

          In the 1430’s, a clergyman named John of Ragusa (a place known today as the coastal region around Dubrovnik, Croatia) took part in church councils at Basel (in Switzerland) and Florence (in Italy) as a representative of the Dominican monastic order.  The top item on the agenda of these councils was reconciliation with the Orthodox Church based in Constantinople.  In the course of his work, John of Ragusa served as an emissary to Constantinople in 1435-1437.  The leaders of the Orthodox Church sent representatives – including Basilios Bessarion, who united with the Roman Catholic church and was made a cardinal in 1439 – to the Council of Florence, where, after much debate, a formal statement of unity was drawn up – only to be rejected later by Orthodox clerics in Constantinople.

          On May 29, 1453, Constantinople fell to Islamic invaders.  Something else had happened ten years earlier which, as it turned out, was also significant:  when John of Ragusa died in 1443, he bequeathed a small collection of manuscripts – possibly souvenirs from his visit to Constantinople, or perhaps gifts from Bessarion – to the Dominican convent at Basel.  This collection included not only some classical works but also a few manuscripts of parts of the New Testament.

          Seventy-two years later, in 1515-1516, Desiderius Erasmus visited Basel in order to use the manuscripts known to be in the possession of the Dominican monks there.  With the help of those manuscripts, along with his vast knowledge of patristic material and other data amassed in his previous research (plus the research-notes of Lorenzo Valla), Erasmus produced the first published printed edition of the Greek New Testament.

          Minuscule 4 – presently kept at the National Library of France as Greek MS 84 (formerly Regius MS 2867) – is either one of those manuscripts which John of Ragusa gave to the monks at Basel, or else it came from some other source.  There seems to be some confusion about whether or not 4 was ever at Basel, and whether or not it was used by Erasmus.  But in any event, readings from this manuscript were known to Robert Stephanus; this manuscript was denoted by the Greek letter γʹ (gamma) in the notations in Stephanus’ 1550 edition of the Greek New Testament.  Minuscule 4 helped define the Textus Receptus.     

          Now let’s get down to business.  Two pages of minuscule 4 conveniently contain, more or less, John 6:65-71 and 7:1-16.  These 23 verses constitute the textual battleground of today’s contest.  Here are the contest’s rules, applied to the text in both manuscripts:

          ● The text of the first hand of each manuscript will be compared to the text of NA27.  Words in brackets in the text of NA27 are considered part of the text.

          ● Transpositions that do not involve any gain or loss of words are mentioned, but are not included in the final totals.

          ● The introduction of one non-original letter = 1 point.

          ● The loss of an original letter = 1 point.

          ● Abbreviations of sacred names, abbreviations of και, and easily deciphered contractions are not counted as variants.

          ● If a sacred name is absent, all its letters are considered absent, even if it is very probable that it would have been abbreviated in the manuscript.

             

Here are the deviations from the text of NA27 in 4.  I have marked each reading in 4 that agrees with the Byzantine Text (RP2005) with a triangle, except for transpositions.

6:65 – 4 has ηρηκα instead of ειρηκα.  (+1, -2)

6:65 – 4 has ει instead of η (+2, -1)

6:65 – 4 has μου (+3) ▲

6:66 – 4 does not have the second εκ (-2) ▲

6:66 – 4 has a transposition

6:67 – 4 has θελεται instead of θελετε (+2, -1)

6:68 – 4 has ουν (+3) ▲

6:69 – 4 has (in abbreviated form) Χριστος ο υιος instead of Αγιος (before του Θυ) (+12, -7)  [Note:  one could plausibly reduce this to +9, -4, since both readings, when uncontracted, share the letters ιος at the end.  But I did not.] ▲

6:69 – 4 has (after του Θυ) του ζωητος (+9) ▲

6:70 – 4 does not have ο Ιησους (-7)   

6:71 – 4 has ελεγε instead of ελεγεν (-1)

6:71 – 4 has Ισκαριωτην instead of Ισκαριωτου (+2, -2) ▲

6:71 – 4 has a transposition

6:71 – 4 has ων (after εις) (+2) ▲

7:1 – 4 has a transposition

7:2 – 4 has no differences

7:3 – 4 has has θεωρησουσι instead of θεωρησουσιν (-1)

7:4 – 4 has a transposition

7:4 – 4 has another transposition

7:5 – 4 has επιστευων instead of επιστευον (+1, -1)

7:6 – 4 has no differences

7:7 – 4 has no differences

7:8 – 4 is missing εγω ουκ αναβαινω εις την εορτην (-26) 

7:8 – 4 has a transposition

7:8 – 4 adds ο before transposed εμος (+1) ▲

7:9 – 4 has αυτοις instead of αυτος (+1) ▲

7:10 – 4 has a transposition

7:10 – 4 has αλλ instead of αλλα (-1) ▲

7:11 – 4 has ελεγων instead of ελεγον (+1, -1)

7:12 – 4 has a transposition

7:12 – 4 does not have δε (-2) ▲

7:12 – 4 has ελεγων instead of ελεγον (+1, -1)

7:13 – 4 has μεντι instead of μεντοι (-1)

7:14 – 4 has ο before Ις (+1) ▲

7:15 – 4 has Και before εθαυμαζον (+3) ▲

7:15 – 4 does not have ουν (-3) ▲

7:15 – 4 has ουτως instead of ουτος (+1, -1)

7:16 – 4 has no differences

Thus in John 6:65-7:16, compared to NA27, minuscule 4 contains 45 non-original letters, and has lost 61 original letters, for a total of 106 letters’ worth of corruption.  (In addition, there are six transpositions in this passage in 4.)

Now let’s look at the deviations from NA27 in the same passage in Codex Sinaiticus (in the “Western” portion of the manuscript):

6:65 – א has ουδις instead of ουδεις (-1)

6:65 – א has εμε instead of με (+1)

6:65 – א does not have αυτω (-4)

6:66 – א has ουν after τουτου (+3)

6:67 – א does not have εκ after πολλοι (-2)

6:67 – א does not have αυτου after μαθητων (-5)

6:67 – א has υμις instead of υμεις (-1)

6:67 – א has θελεται instead of θελετε (+2, -1)

6:68 – א has no differences

6:69 – א has ημις instead of ημεις (-1)

6:70 – א does not has αυτοις ο (-7)

6:70 – א has και ειπεν (+8)

6:70 – א has ουχι instead of ουκ (+2, -1)

6:70 – א has a transposition

6:70 – א does not have τους (-4)

6:70 – א does not have εις (-3)

6:71 – א does not have τον (-3)

6:71 – א has απο (+3)

6:71 – א has Καρυωτου instead of Ισκαριωτου (+1, -3)

6:71 – א has και after γαρ (+3)

6:71 – א has εμελλον instead of εμελλεν (+1, -1)

6:71 – א has a transposition

6:71 – א has ων after εις (+2)

7:1 – א has αποκτιναι instead of αποκτειναι (-1)

7:2 – א has no differences

7:3 – א has a transposition

7:3 – א has θεωρουσιν instead of θεωρησουσιν (-2)

7:3 – א has a transposition

7:4 – א has ουδις instead of ουδεις (-1)

7:4 – א has ποιων instead of ποιει (+2, -2)

7:4 – א does not have και (-3)

7:4 – א has ζητι instead of ζητει (-1)

7:5 – א has no differences

7:6 – א does not have ουν (-3)

7:6 – א does not have ο before Ις (-1)

7:7 – א has a transposition

7:7 – א does not have εγω (-3)

7:7 – א does not have περι αυτου (-9)

7:7 – א has πονιρα instead of πονηρα (+1, -1)

7:8 – א has αναβηται instead of αναβητε (+2, -1)

7:8 – א has ταυτην before εγω (+6)

7:9 – א does not have δε (-2)

7:9 – א has εμινεν instead of εμεινεν (-1)

7:10 – א has αλλ instead of αλλα (-1)

7:10 – א does not have ως (-2)

7:11 – א has εκινος instead of εκεινος (-1)

7:12 – א has a transposition

7:12 – א has τω οχλω instead of τοις οχλοις (+2, -6)

7:12 – א does not have δε (-2) 

7:13 – א has ουδις instead of ουδεις (-1)

7:13 – א has a transposition

7:14 – א has ερτης instead of εορτης (-1)

7:15 – א has no differences

7:16 – א does not have ο before Ις (-1)

Thus in John 6:65-7:16, compared to NA27, Codex Sinaiticus contains 39 non-original letters, and has lost 83 original letters, for a total of 122 letters’ worth of corruption.  (In addition, there are seven transpositions in this passage in Codex Sinaiticus.)

          Now we all know what we have been told about the manuscripts upon which the Textus Receptus was based:   they were “The feeblest of manuscript resources” and “Late medieval manuscripts of inferior quality” and so forth.  But this collides with what we see in John 6:65-7:16, where minuscule 4 has less corruption than Codex Sinaiticus.  (This calculation is made, remember, using the NA27 compilation as the standard for comparison.  If the Byzantine Text were used as the standard of comparison instead, then 4 would only have 52 letters’ worth of corruption in this passage (half of which would be in 7:8), and Codex Sinaiticus would still have over twice that amount.)

          If the rate of corruption were even in all transmission-streams, then we could expect late manuscripts to be more corrupt than early ones.  But direct evaluations of sample-passages show that the rates of corruption in different transmission-streams were not the same.  About 260 years after the Gospel of John was written, Codex Sinaiticus had more corruptions in John 6:65-7:16 than minuscule 4 had at the end of a 1,100-year-long transmission-stream.

          To sum up:  even though the copyist of 4 made a major mistake in John 7:8, the text of 4 still has less corruption in John 6:65-7:16 than Codex Sinaiticus.  To be precise:  4 has 106 letters’ worth of corruption (45 non-original letters gained; 61 original letters lost – and six transpositions) and Codex Sinaiticus has 122 letters’ worth of corruption (39 non-original letters gained; 83 original letters lost – and seven transpositions).  Once again the famous heavyweight has lost to a younger opponent.

          (A tangential note:  Papyrus 66, Papyrus 75, and Codex Vaticanus read ουπω in John 7:8, thus agreeing with the usual Byzantine reading, and disagreeing with Codex Sinaiticus.)

          [Readers are invited to double-check the data and the math in this post.]

Greek Lectionaries at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

          Besides releasing page-views of images from 57 continuous-text Greek New Testament manuscripts, the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) has made available page-views of 21 Greek lectionaries at the Gallica website.  The list here gives the Gregory-Aland identification-number, with the catalogue-number in parentheses.  For some lectionaries, the affinity of the text (according to data provided at the Center for the Study and Preservation of the Majority Text) is provided within brackets.

Lectionary 12 (Greek 310) l-e [Phi-Maj]  Divergent text.  Produced in the 1200s.    

       
Lectionary 15 (Greek 302) l-e [K] – Produced in the 1200s.            

Lectionary 63 (Greek 277) – The “Blue Fish Lectionary,” produced in the 900s.  Full-color images.  Written in uncial-script with colorful initials.  

Fol. 105 of a lectionary from the 800s
written in uncial script.

Lectionary 64 (Greek 281) l-esk – Uncial lectionary, produced in the 800s. 

Lectionary 68 (Greek 285) l-e [Phi-Maj] – Produced in the 1100s.              

Lectionary 69 (Greek 286) l-e [Phi-Maj] – Produced in the 1100s.

            

Lectionary 70 (Greek 288) l-e [Phi-Maj] – Produced in the 1100s.

            

Lectionary 72 & Lectionary 1358 (Greek 290) l-esk – Uncial end-leaves.

Lectionary 74 (Greek 292) l-esk 

Lectionary 75 (Greek 293) l-e [Phi-Maj]

            

Lectionary 77 (Greek 296) l-esk – Produced in the 1100s.

Lectionary 83 (Greek 294) l-e – Produced in the 1000s or 1100s.

MS 9, fol. 436 (from 1167/8):
John, writing his Gospel
and getting his picture taken.

Lectionary 86 (Greek 311) l-e [K^r/f³⁵] – Produced in 1336.

Lectionary 87 (Greek 313) l-esk – Produced in the 1300s. 

Lectionary 89 (Greek 316) l-esk – Produced in the 1300s.

Lectionary 90 (Greek 317) l-esk – Produced in 1553.

Lectionary 91 (Greek 318) l-esk – Produced in the 1300s. 

Lectionary 92 (Greek 324) l-akp – Produced in the 1300s. 

Lectionary 99 (Greek 380) l-esk – Produced in the 1500s.

             

Lectionary 100 (Greek 381) l-esk – Produced in 1550.

Lectionary 147 (Greek 319) l-ae – Produced in the 1100s.

Lectionary 148 (Greek 320) l-ae – Produced in the 1100s. 

          In addition, a Greek Gospels-manuscript which was not mentioned in the earlier list of Greek manuscripts at Gallica should be included.  Its catalog-number is MS 1.916 at the National and University Library of Strasbourg, but I have not tracked down its Gregory-Aland identification-number.  Its full-color page-views include the opening pages of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. 

          Another lectionary is listed only as National and University Library of Strasbourg MS 1.914.

           

         Many manuscripts, while not lectionaries, contain lection-lists and calendars of lections.  For example, minuscule 9 – Greek 82 at Gallica/BnF (considered to be the manuscript cited by Stephanus as ιβʹ) – not only contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but also features an index of lections.